IMSEV7N Turns Discernment Into Song

Before IMSEV7N ever wrote a lyric, she was learning music in the womb. Her father, a DJ in the 90s, used to press headphones to her mother's stomach so she could absorb every genre before birth. Born to Ugandan immigrant parents in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, she grew up finding it hard to connect with peers — she is autistic, though she wasn't diagnosed until adulthood — and turned to poetry and humming melodies in class as a way to process the world. Those scribbled notebooks eventually became songs. Her real entry into music came in college, when she reinvented herself under a new name and DM'd an acquaintance to ask if she could play them a song she'd made. That track, "Mukwaano" — a Ugandan love song whose title translates to "my love" — ended up on college radio. Strangers began asking her what the lyrics meant, and for the first time, she says, she felt seen. She credits her mother, who endured financial hardship, illness, and separation from family in Uganda, as her biggest inspiration — a steady example, she says, that faith and love matter more than what you own. Now recording as IMSEV7N, she's preparing her album "Discernm3nt," which traces her own transformation — from the name Acklynn to Seven — through songs tied to the seven deadly sins. Its lead single, "MMDA (Man My Daddy Ain't)," features Nigerian artist NiinetyNine, with each artist recording their verse an ocean apart before stitching the song together across time zones. For IMSEV7N, the point isn't chart success — it's connection. She writes, she says, for the voiceless, the autistic, and anyone who has ever felt misunderstood, hoping listeners find in her lyrics the words they didn't have for their own feelings.